"Out?"
"Yes, with his bicycle."
"They why didn't he ask you to go with him?"
"I'm sure I don't know," said Van der Welcke, angrily, shrugging his shoulders.
Constance too did not think it friendly of Guy:
"What does it mean?" she wondered to herself. "He ought to have been working, but, if he wanted to go cycling, he might really have let his uncle know."
And her soul too became filled with melancholy, because young people were inevitably so ungrateful. But she said nothing to Van der Welcke; and they never knew that they often thought and felt alike, as in an imperceptible harmony of approaching old age that found only a negative expression: they so seldom quarrelled nowadays, at most exchanged a single irritable word, even though no deep sympathy had ever come to them. . . .
Constance went to her room to put on a hat; the carriage was ordered; she was going for a drive with the girls. She felt worried about poor Gerdy, who no longer took pleasure in anything:
"It will pass," she thought. "We have all of us, in our time, been through a phase of melancholy. . . . Adeline told me that Gerdy was in love with Erzeele . . . but he doesn't appear to think about her. . . . Oh, how I worry and worry about it all: about my poor boy, about Mathilde! . . . Erzeele is bound . . . is bound to be attracted by her. . . . Come, I need air, in this fine weather; and yet this warm air oppresses me: the summer is always oppressive in our country. The weather in our country is always becoming something: it never has become anything, like the weather in the south; it is becoming, always becoming some-
